Russia’s RIA Novosti news service reported –

MOSCOW, October 10 (RIA Novosti) – US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden has met with former US security officials who now campaign against what they call the misuse of state secrecy, WikiLeaks said Thursday.

The meeting with former officials from the US Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency (NSA), the FBI, the Department of Justice, and WikiLeaks representative Sarah Harrison, took place in the Russian capital on Wednesday.

WikiLeaks tweeted a link to a gettyimages photo of Snowden, Harrison and the group, which identifies the others as US government whistleblowers who were in Moscow to present Snowden with the Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence award.

What exactly is the Sam Adam’s award?

“The Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence confers an award each year to a person exemplifying the courage, persistence and devotion to the truth of CIA analyst Sam Adams.  Many distinguished past award winners include prominent whistleblowers and former intelligence agents.”

And just in case you’re not caught up on intelligence whistleblowers, such as Sam Adams, here’s a snippet from his Wikipedia bio –

Adams, a descendent of the political Adams family, was in the CIA from 1963 until 1973, but grew frustrated with the perversion of intelligence to meet political objectives. He claimed U.S. Army General William C. Westmoreland had conspired to minimize reported Vietnamese enemy troop strength in 1967.

Adams testified for the defense in the 1973 espionage trial of Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony J. Russo, accused in connection with the 1971 illegal transmission of the Pentagon Papers, a secret Government-sponsored history of the Vietnam War. Citing Government misconduct, a Federal judge dismissed all charges against the two. Mr. Adams told the court in that trial that he believed there had been political pressures in the military to depict the North Vietnamese and Vietcong in 1967 as weaker than they actually were. After visiting South Vietnam four times between 1966 and 1967, Mr. Adams concluded that senior military intelligence officers were underestimating the strength of the enemy, perhaps by half. He argued for a higher troop count, but late in 1967 the C.I.A. reached an agreement with the military on lower figures. Adams responded with an internal memorandum calling the agreement a monument of deceit. In January 1968, after the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the CIA adopted an enemy count along the lines he had recommended. By then, he had left the Vietnamese affairs staff in protest, and was concentrating on Cambodia.

In 1969 Adams removed CIA documents to argue his case and buried them in the woods near his 250-acre (1.0 km²) farm in Virginia. After his resignation from the agency in 1973, he sought the support of other intelligence officials to prove that there was a Saigon cover-up. From the massive chronologies Mr. Adams compiled, he detailed his allegations in a Harper’s Magazine article in 1975. He also testified before the House Select Committee on Intelligence, which reached conclusions similar to his own.

In 1982 Adams provided critical evidence to CBS News reporters who made the documentary “The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception”. General Westmoreland subsequently sued both Adams and CBS News for libel, but the case was settled privately.

Adams died in 1988.

Snowden shares a “corner-brightener candlestick” with a stellar group of intelligence whistleblowers –

• 2002: Coleen Rowley
• 2003: Katharine Gun
• 2004: Sibel Edmonds
• 2005: Craig Murray
• 2006: Samuel Provance^[2][3]
• 2007: Andrew Wilkie
• 2008: Frank Grevil^[4][5]
• 2009: Larry Wilkerson^[6]
• 2010: Wikileaks and Julian Assange^[7][8]
• 2011: Thomas Andrews Drake and Jesselyn Radack
• 2012: Thomas Fingar^[9]
• 2013: Edward Snowden^[10]